


Left to His Own Devices

by notoneforreality



Series: R&D (Relationships and Dynamics) [5]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 007 Fest, 007 Fest 2020, Abduction, Autistic Character, Bondlock, Escape, Kidnapped Q, Kidnapping, M/M, Non-Verbal, Q (James Bond) is a Holmes, Q deals with this better than he dealt with the thing at Tesco, Q is Autistic, Q is not a Damsel in Distress, Q's got things to keep himself occupied in the meanwhile, Rescue, Stimming, Toaster - Freeform, autistic traits, but only because why bother when Bond does that better, he's waiting to be rescued, just about, not really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24881962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notoneforreality/pseuds/notoneforreality
Summary: Q is kidnapped by people who want to use his brain. The want to use his brain because they have no idea what they're doing themselves, which means they won't notice if he doesn't quite follow instructions.In which Q is productive while he waits to be rescued.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Series: R&D (Relationships and Dynamics) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790158
Comments: 7
Kudos: 296





	Left to His Own Devices

When Q comes back into his head after the meltdown, he’s in a cell. Part of him is impressed with whoever it is having managed to get him into a cell while he was having a meltdown, and another hopes very much that he lashed out and hurt as many people as possible in the process. It’s not often he wishes his meltdowns cause other people harm, but it’s also not often that a meltdown is caused by aggressive abduction.

He’s on a concrete floor, next to a metal bed frame with a thin mattress on it, but no blanket, despite how cold it is. The door is a solid, steel thing, with no apparent keyhole on the inside. Even if there had been…. He checks his pockets, to find them emptied of the usual kits he keeps stashed on his person. They haven’t taken his glasses, which means he’s still got a screwdriver in one arm and a tiny blade in the other, but that isn’t enough to get him out, especially when he doesn’t know how far he’ll have to make it.

There’s also the fact that meltdowns are exhausting and he wants to curl up in a ball and cry and sleep for about thirty hours, rather than commit any daring escape a la James. He picks a corner away from the door and hunches up in it, wrapping his arms around his legs and rocking. When he doesn’t turn up for work, someone will come looking. He just has to wait until then.

Q sings the periodic table song in his head and makes it all the way round three times. On the fourth time, he reaches Promethium, and then the door rattles and slides open. A tall thin women strides into the room, round-rimmed glasses perched on her nose and a sneer pulling at her lips.

“You’re supposed to be the brains of the operation.”

Q rolls his eyes and doesn’t stop rocking. When she reaches down to touch his arm, he yells and smacks her hand away, glaring at her hips, not daring to look any higher and risk making eye-contact. Not now.

He pushes himself to his feet but keeps his gaze low. If she wants to take him somewhere, he’ll go without a fuss. He doesn’t say this though, just waits. Then, when she moves, he echoes her movements.

It takes her a moment to catch on, but then she sighs and says, “Fine. But if you even try running off you’ll regret it.”

Outside the cell, two guards fall into step behind Q, so he’s sandwiched between them and the woman leading the way. If he wanted to, he could slip down one of the side passages they pass, but it wouldn’t be much use without any idea what to do after that.

The corridor opens out into a wide room, the walls panelled in more metal reflecting the only illumination filtering through the skylight in the ceiling. There’s a long table on one side of the room, a couch on the other, and a chair at the far end. A man is sat on it, legs cross ankle over knee, elbows resting on the arm. Q squints at the grey fedora the man’s wearing.

The woman directs Q to stop in front of the chair, and he stands still, wrapping one hand tight around his other wrist and twisting just a little. The pressure balances on the edge of uncomfortable. 

“Apparently, you’re the Quartermaster,” the man on the chair says. Q doesn’t move. He harrumphs. “My name is Trago Mills, and you’re going to do a job for me.”

They want him to build a weapons system, and he wants to punch the man in the face — he’s been spending too much time with James — but there are twelve guards with guns stationed around the perimeter of the room, plus the two still standing off his shoulders, and he is not a field agent with the ability to spit in the face of those odds. 

Instead, he allows them to direct him to a workstation, with one ancient desktop computer, one slightly less archaic laptop, and a hand written list of things that his weapons system should be able to do.

He scans the list, snorts, and sits down in front of the laptop. This is something he can work with.

The first thing he does is jury rig a connection to both Six and James’ phone, sending his distress code and the basics in binary:  _ unknown foe, two head, fifteen muscle, want weapons dev. _

The muscle over Q’s shoulder, one of the men who helped escort him from his cell, grunts. 

“Can you type anything other than ones and zeros?”

Q doesn’t ask if the muscle can code, and nor does he tell him to shut up, and thinks it’s probably a good thing his tongue isn’t in working order right now, because otherwise he would get himself into trouble.

He doesn’t bother trying to contact either of his brothers, because there’s no point worrying them when MI6 can do their actual job and retrieve their Quartermaster without interference from either the British Government or a jumped up amateur detective. Q refuses to be responsible for any sort of disruption in Mycroft’s day, or any sort of interest in Sherlock’s.

A response from Six, from R, is immediate:  _ Identifying location. Rescue ASAP but no clues as yet. _

It’s not much, but it’s confirmation that Six are already looking for him. Now, he just has to keep himself occupied until a retrieval team knocks the door down, and hopefully some of the guards with it.

He works on his Python, to start with, playing around with coding that he hasn’t used since he was sixteen. The last time he used it was for making games for the boys to play on in IT when the were supposed to be using functions in Excel. This time he settles for a simple feedback loop to run down the screen in a window that he can pull to the front if anyone who will recognise code shows up. 

When that’s done, he sets about working on a code he’s been fiddling with for the past couple of weeks, to do with location and communication. It takes long enough to copy in what he had from memory that he’s only just finished when someone comes to bring him to dinner. 

Dinner is a tray of bread, some cold ham, and a glass of water. Q stares at it with one eyebrow raised until the first woman turns up.

“We’re hardly going to poison you before you’ve finished what we want.”

It’s a compelling argument, and Q’s stomach is starting to complain, so he eats. Slowly. The bread is dry and odd-tasting and Q has to shake his hand and rock for the amount of time it takes to eat it, just to try and offset the sensory hell that he’s putting into his mouth. If it were anywhere else, he’d refuse to eat it rather than risk another meltdown so soon after the last, but he doubts the people who kidnapped him for nefarious purposes would be willing to provide an alternative meal. 

Besides, he hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and that feels like a long time ago.

At least the ham is nice.

After dinner he’s taken back to his cell. The hollow silence of the room means it takes forever, his brain scrabbling for stimulation and finding it in endless circles of restless thoughts, instead of the usual well-known YouTube video. It’s a long night, and he has even less grasp on time down here than he usually does, but he gets some amount of sleep and wakes up to the first woman coming to collect him again.

The day goes like this: breakfast, consisting of dry toast that scratches on Q’s throat and makes him cough, irritation flaring down his trachea; time at the computer, which he spends trying to work out why only one aspect of the location and communication will work at any one time; bread and butter for lunch; back to the computer and the same problem, until he finds the issue seven-hundred lines deep in the code; bread and ham for dinner; back to the cell.

The next day goes much the same, with Q slowly fixing and developing the coding for his program.

On the fourth day, they bring him hardware.

Q surveys the mass of metal, plastic and wires they’ve hauled in, all tipped haphazardly into a blue crate, and grins.

Trago Mills comes to visit him, once he starts constructing things. He watches him work and asks a few questions that Q doesn’t answer. He hasn’t spoken once since being here. There hasn’t been much incentive for him to speak, no chance of having a chat with a friendly face when one is a prisoner in enemy territory, but his tongue is heavy in his mouth, and his chest screams at him when he tries to whisper to himself every night, just to see if he can. It doesn’t matter though, when it’s just him and his code and his construction.

He builds a toaster. James dropped the last one out of the window onto the head of a man that had been following both of them to and from the flat for three days, and then shot both the man and the toaster for good measure. After the drop, Q had been hoping to fix it, but after the bullets, it was a lost cause. In the two weeks since, they’d gone without toast for lack of time to buy or make a new one, thanks to a rush of work involving a tangled mess of three separate terrorist groups working on two different attacks.

Now, however, he has plenty of time and free run of both a computer and a pile of hardware containing everything he needs.

The next day, both the woman and Mills turn up to watch Q work. He’s been ignoring them for the most part, but when Mills squints at a small patch of fancy wiring and soldering and asks if that’s to do with the timing mechanism, Q nods and manages to save his grin for when they both leave and his guard isn’t paying attention. It is to do with timing: timing the perfect brown toast.

On Q’s third day with physical parts, he finishes his creation and comes to the sudden and belated realisation that it looks very obviously like a toaster and not at all anything like a missile. Or a weapons system hub. That’s less than ideal. He’s not due a visit, today — the woman and Mills came by yesterday, and nothing new has been brought in since then that they might want to check up on — but he’s quite happy with the intelligent programming he was able to build in using the laptop to write a code and butchering the desktop for the processor. He doesn’t want to take it apart again.

The guard frowns at the toaster.

“That looks like a toaster,” he says. 

Q puts his hands on his hips and eyes the toaster himself, ignoring Malcolm (a man not used to being stood guard alone all day, he had broken on the second afternoon, launching into the first of many monologues while Q tapped at the keyboard. During one of his stories about his mother trying to break up him and his girlfriend, Q had discovered his name was Malcom Frances Harrod, which was far fancier than the guard’s demeanour and general appearance suggested). He debates possibilities in his mind, trying not to circle back to the last resort, which is to destroy the thing. A plan for building around and disguising the toaster is just starting to from in his mind, when a series of thuds echoes in the corridor outside.

The door bursts open. Q turns to the door, recognises James, and turns back to scrutinise the toaster again. Malcom turns to the door and says a long list of swear words, then raises his arm and tries to shoot.

Out of the corner of his eye, Q sees James already too close to be hit, grabbing Malcom’s arm and twisting it behind him until he cries out and drops the gun. James kicks it away from them, and Q picks it up absently. He would have liked to see if the toaster works, but he can do that later. For now, he gets the toaster and the laptop under one arm, and trains the gun on Malcom with the other hand.

Malcom freezes where he’s been trying to wriggle out of James’ hold. James stares at Q.

“We’ve been scouring the country for you, thinking you’d be locked up and tortured by someone trying to get back at Six, and you’ve been sat in here making a bloody toaster?”

Q beams at James’ incredulous tone, and then tips his head towards the door. He can’t speak, and his hands are full, but James huffs like Q has made his usual witty retort, and drops Malcom into a heap on the floor. 

“Alright then,” James says. “Let’s get home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Keep notes:  
> \--I apologise for anyone who knows the actual trago mills but I, like Q, have been watching ancient mock the week and just watched the episode in which they say ‘trago mills sounds like a Bond villain’ and well.... ((for those who haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkOaQMf25QE 5:45-6:35 + 9:58-10:08)  
> \--now this is a bit more like it. all the fun of autism with all the fun of also being completely nonchalant about a ridiculous situation  
> \--q gets kidnapped by villains who want him to build a bomb only they don't know shit about engineering so he just builds a toaster to kill time while he waits for Bond to turn up  
> \--they keep asking if it's done and he's like "you can't rush me, I have to get the timing mechanism just right" "for the detonation?" "something like that"  
> \--the title aka butchering Adams bc left to his own devices Q does build a toaster - “The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.” (Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless)


End file.
